A guy who knows a guy who’s on the Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull team has passed along #2’s impressions of the finished film. I’m not 100% comfortable running them, given the obvious fact that #2 is a coward, cowering like an eight year-old girl behind the creased khaki slacks of #1, as well as a shill and a spinner, but here goes anyway:

Bondage & discipline: Cate Blanchett‘s Agent Spalko

“I felt compelled to write, having just read Anne Thompson‘s 4.17 Variety column which states that ‘the advance buzz on Indy 4 is getting damaging enough that Lucas and Spielberg may want to reconsider the current strategy of waiting until May 18 to show the film…that’s a long way off.’
Composer John Williams, Guy #2 says, was initially correct on the Indy 4 running time of 140 minutes, but the film “underwent belt tightening and has been receiving customary tweaking for its final mix.”
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull “is the best of the Indy sequels,” he declares. “Steven Spielberg‘s helming puts the imitators (The Mummy, National Treasure) to shame. There are many breakneck set pieces, with a protracted jungle chase being particularly memorable. As well as being evocative of the truck chase from the first movie.
Harrison Ford, he claims, “gives his best performance in the role, not only physically belying his age but layering in welcome poignancy. More than before, audiences will be rooting for Indy. Shia LaBeouf makes essential contributions. Chemistry between he and Ford is palpable, yielding some nice character comedy.
“Jones is particularly beleaguered throughout the adventure, making his predicaments all the more entertaining.
“The film has the strongest supporting cast of the sequels. They all raise the bar. Ray Winstone amuses and fascinates, but the strongest impression is left by Cate Blanchett‘s Agent Spalko, a characterization that achieves instant cult status.
“Hopefully, the surprises in this film can continue to be guarded. Eventually, these spoilers will get out, but it would be shameful for reviewers and bloggers to reveal an ending that any longtime diehard fan of the films could only dream about. Expect a particularly resounding reaction in the theater.
“Kudos to screenwriter David Koepp for pulling all this together on the page. This will easily be the biggest hit of the year.”

“With just two days until Pennsylvania kicks off the final round of primaries, political observers say there’s clear evidence that the election of 2008 represents a new universe — and a new generation — when it comes to White House contests,” writes SF Chronicle reporter Carla Marinucci. “And the political phenomenon of Barack Obama is symbolic of the game-changing attitudes and growing influence to be wielded by the upcoming generation of ‘Millennial’ voters — the largest and most diverse generation in American history, born between 1982 and 2003 — who already are helping to shape the race.”

Barack Obama is right outside her screen door and that pudgy woman leaning against the doorframe with her arms folded and her dog next to her can’t be roused to even step outside? What could be the explanation? Indifference? Laziness? Medication? I have witnessed this sort of American Somnambulance all my life among semi-educated people, and despise it like nothing else on this earth.

That’s fine, but can Millenial voters be trusted to stand up and do the thing? A greater percentage of them has voted in primaries and the ’04 election, which has been great, but an awful lot of them — the 21-and-unders — are subject, it seems to me, to the usual hormonal distractions and the old fiddle-while-Rome-burns routine. I hope and pray that I’m wrong.
Authors Morley Winograd and Michael Hais, who just released “Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube and the Future of American Politics,” a book that examines the seismic generational and cultural realignments at play on the political stage this year, “say the political pileups of the past week represent a perfect example of how the 20-somethings have managed to reshape conventional politics in the current race for the White House.
“There was Obama’s brouhaha over the ‘bitter’ comments in San Francisco — fueled by Clinton, McCain and the media — followed by a rough Philadelphia debate in which Clinton got tough and ABC moderators got tougher, peppering him about his recent stumbles and gaffes.
“That looked to be a perfect storm that might have swamped a first-time presidential candidate, but it wasn’t Obama who took the body blows. Instead, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson, the journalists, were publicly pummeled for “gotcha games,” and Clinton came away with nary a new superdelegate in her pocket.
“Meanwhile, Obama literally brushed it all off as the old way of doing things, while both Pennsylvania and national polls appear to suggest that none of it has stuck to him. Indeed, he looks even stronger, said Winograd, a former senior adviser to Vice President Al Gore during the Clinton administration.
“Twenty-somethings ‘are driving the presidential race in a huge way,’ said Annemarie Stephens, an organizer for the youth-oriented ‘Nation for Change’ rally to celebrate Obama’s campaign today at Frank Ogawa Plaza in Oakland. The event, which will star gospel, hip-hop and ethnic musicians — like similar rallies planned in nearly all 50 states today — has been put together almost entirely on the internet, she said.
“‘People are concerned about the well-being of this country,’ she said. ‘It’s no longer politics as usual; we’re not going to stand for the pettiness.'”

Who drives James Bond‘s Aston Martin off a cliff in the middle of a rainstorm and dumps it in a lake? The guy who did this had been hired as a driver? Quantum of Solace producers paid this asshole to deliver the super-expensive car to the set in heavy rain yesterday morning when it went off the road and splashed into northern Italy’s Lake Garda.

A report said that the Aston Martin in question is black. (What happened to light gray?) Could the town on Lake Garda’s western shore be the same one made (in)famous by Pier Paolo Pasolini?

Steve Mason‘s weekend estimates are edging closer to HE’s. Yesterday morning he had The Forbidden Kingdom at $19 million with $18 million or so going to Forgetting Sarah Marshall. My forecast of nearly a $4.5 million gap between the two — Kingdom‘s $21,175,000 vs. Marshall‘s $16,858,000 for Marshall. Now Mason has them about $3 million apart with Kingdom earning an estimated $20.5 million vs. $17 million for Marshall. Any way you cut it, Team Apatow is content but not jubilant. The HE view is torn between a comme ci comme ca and a view that any kind of galumph shortfall is probably better for the culture than not.

This 23/6 video compresses last Wednesday’s Philadelphia Democratic debate by emphasizing the banality of the repetitions used by everyone, and all but ignores the grotesque Sean Hannity flavor of the gotcha questions that every living soul in the blue world has condemned. Who are these guys and how off-the-mark can they get? And I don’t just mean George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson. The only thing that points out what that debate was really about is a quick cut to the disgusted face of ABC correspondent Jake Tapper.

The red-band trailer for Andrew Fleming’s Hamlet 2 (Focus, 8.22.08), which did pretty well for itself at Sundance ’08. It’s about an eccentric high-school-drama teacher (Steve Coogan) enlisting his Tucson, Arizona, students as he conceives and stages a politically incorrect musical sequel to William Shakespeare‘s Hamlet. Costarring Catherine Keener, Amy Poehler, David Arquette and Elisabeth Shue.

Slightly different weekend numbers (i.e., different than Steve Mason‘s) came in an hour ago. Mason had The Forbidden Kingdom at $19 million for the weekend vs. $18 million earned by Forgetting Sarah Marshall. But a rival studio estimate has the Kingdom at $21,175,000 vs. $16,858,000 — a gap of almost $4.5 million. Expelled, the right-wing propaganda doc, came in ninth with $3,400,000 and $2200 a print…dead. And 88 Minutes, the Jon Avnet-Al Pacino thriller, will earn a lousy $6,992,000 by Sunday night.

The three strongest impressions I have about Morgan Spurlock‘s Where In The World is Osama Bin Laden? (Weinstein Co., 4.18) are, in this order, trivial, critical and philosophical. I’m not afraid of admitting to trivial concerns, in part because I also know a worthy belief (or hope current) when I hear it.

Impression #1 is that since the Super-Size Me days, Spurlock has become super follically challenged and needs to talk to the Hair Club for Men. Impression #2 is that the tone of most of the film is way too flip and dumbed-down — it seems aimed at the dumbasses who wouldn’t want to watch a film about the east-west cultural divide and the nature of Islamic anti-U.S. fervor unless the filmmaker uses a chuckling whimsical tone and tosses in a few jokes. Impression #3 is that the final few minutes of Spurlock’s film say “the right thing,” which is that we need to try to find our common humanity and build whatever bridges we can, and to do that we need recognize the purist crazies in our respective cultures and isolate them.
This gives me a chance to talk again about Adam Curtis‘s The Power of Nightmares, which articulates the third point in a much more profound and penetrating way than Spurlock’s film does. Anyone who hasn’t seen it, whether they go to Spurlock’s film or not, needs to do so. It’s easily downloadable right here.
I wrote about it three years ago. “This new three-hour doc weaves together all sorts of disparate historical strands to relate two fascinating spiritual and political case histories, that of the American neo-conservatives and the Islamic fundamentalists,” I said. “The payoff is an explanation of why they’re fighting each other now with such ferocity (beyond the obvious provocation of 9/11), and why the end of their respective holy war, waged for their own separate but like-minded motives, is nowhere in sight.

“That’s right — the Islamics vs. the neo-cons. You might think the United States of America is engaged in a fierce conflict with Middle-Eastern terrorists in order to prevent another domestic attack, but what’s really going on is more in the nature of a war between clans. Like the one between Burl Ives vs. Charles Bickford in The Big Country, say, or the Hatfields vs. the McCoys.
“It’s not that Curtis’s doc is saying anything radically new here, certainly not to those in the hard-core news junkie, academic or think-tank loop, but it makes its case in a remarkably well-ordered and comprehensive way, which…you know…helps moderately aware dilettantes like myself make sense of it all.
“The film contends that the anti-western terrorists and the neo-con hardliners in the George W. Bush White House are two peas in a fundamentalist pod, and that they seem to be almost made for each other in an odd way, and they need each other’s hatred to fuel their respective power bases but are, in fact, almost identical in their purist fervor, and are pretty much cut from the same philosophical cloth.
“It says, in other words, that Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz have a lot in common with Osama bin Laden. It also says that the mythology of ‘Al-Qeada’ was whipped up by the Bushies, that the term wasn’t even used by bin Laden until the Americans more or less coined it, and that the idea of bin Laden running a disciplined and coordinated terrorist network is a myth.

“Nightmares doesn’t trash the Bushies in order to portray the terrorists in some kind of vaguely admiring light. It says — okay, implies — that both factions are too in love with purity and consequently half out of their minds.
The three chapters are titled Baby, It’s Cold Outside (about the growth of both camps from the `50s through the `80s), The Phantom Victory” (about the Reagan years and how the Neo-Cons and the Islamics got together in battling the Russians during the Afghanistan War) and Shadows in the Cave (about how things have gone from 9.11 until the present).
“This conclusion leaves us with a feeling that we ought to stand up and act like good reasonable Gregory Peck-styled liberals and separate ourselves from these guys and their nutbag holy war, and maybe send the Islamics and the neo-cons off to a desert island and let them fight it out alone with clubs and knives.” This is almost precisely what Spurlock says at the finale of Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?. minus the desert-island idea.
“The neo-cons and the Islamists ‘believe that the main problem with modern society is that individuals question everything,’ Curtis told a reporter for London Time Out last October, ‘[and] by doing that the questioners have already torn down God, that eventually they will tear down everything else and therefore they have to be opposed.’

“In other words,” I wrote, “these camps are both enemies of liberal thought and the pursuit of personal fulfillment in the anti-traditionalist, hastened-gratification sense of that term. They believe that liberal freedoms have eroded the spiritual fabric that has held their respective societies together in the past. Curtis’s doc shows how these two movements have pushed their hardcore agendas over the last four or five decades to save their cultures from what they see as encroaching moral rot.
“I genuinely feel that Curtis’s film is more wide-ranging and sees right into the heart of these warring ideological beasts in a much sharper and more revelatory fashion than Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.
You will probably never see this doc on American broadcast television and perhaps not even on any U.S. cable channels, but there’s something about Curtis’s pointed, relentless and irreverent British perspective that seems to cut right through the cobweb of our perceptions and draw a bead on what’s really happening.”